Easy A (2010)

The one important thing that I learned from Easy A is that I could watch Emma Stone talk for hours and never get bored. I mean, in any movie she is in, she just bleeds charisma out of her ears. She is easily one of the single most charming people working in modern cinema today, and with The Help, Zombieland, Crazy Stupid Love, and a lot of projects on the horizon, it looks like (to my joy) that she won’t be going away anytime soon. But what is arguably one of the single best works of her acting is Easy A, the movie that got Stone a Golden Globe nod for Best Actress, something that she will win in the future when she finally starts to make movies that are truly the best of the year, and not just good movies where she is the best thing in that movie.

Based off of the novel that you may have read if you ever took a high school literature class, The Scarlet Letter, but doing so in an extremely self-referential way, Easy A is the high-school tale of Olive Penderghast (Stone) who after a fun night of listening to the song “Pocket Full of Sunshine” over and over again, is grilled about it by her friend (Aly Michalka), who was told by Olive that she was going on a date subconsciously. The rational (sometimes the only one in the movie) Olive tries to sway her friend’s interest by telling a little white lie that seems to make her happy-that Olive seemed to have lost a little something over the weekend. Of course, this goes completely out of proportion which sends Olive into a system of being a faked tramp for the losers, something that ends up involving Olive’s parents (Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson, who will now go into the modern movie awesome parents hall of fame along with Juno’s), the marriage of her favorite teacher (Thomas Haden Church) to his unfaithful wife (Phoebe Buffet/Regina Phalange…I mean…Lisa Kudrow), and a psychopathic religious nut (hilariously played by Amanda Bynes striking every single note that I have with the crazy hyper-religious typed who try to force every single thing they believe on other people (they’re the same people who got Seven Days in Utopia and Courageous made), no matter what, to pure brilliance. These characters all come together in a gigantic wonderful film, one that I truly do love.

This movie has some extremely funny people behind it, including Will Gluck, who went on to make Friends with Benefits a year later, and is rising onto the comedy scene. I have a funny story about Easy A. The first time that I ever saw it, I saw it with my mom and my best friend. After the movie, me and my friend agreed that it was a really good film. My mother was horrified. “I…I thought it was about school and grades!” Well mom, in a sense, it was.
8.5/10